Politics Archives

Wednesday

12 Jun 2013

Steerpike

MPs pulling strings

The SNP was out in force at the annual Macmillan Lords Vs Commons tug-of-war in Westminster last night. Pete Wishart, the rocker turned MP, turned up to support fellow traveller Angus McNeil, the Commons’ captain. Wishart looked baffled by the non-whisky brown drink on offer at the bar. Clearly, Pimms has not reached Perthshire. The BBC’s James Landale host the annual jolly once more. And BAE System flexed its muscles by picking up the tab again – any MP whose constituency contains so much as an aviation-related nut and bolt factory came to pay homage to the ‘job creators’. Alas, there was no romance and even less competition. The Lords team was crushed by an

Isabel Hardman

Lib Dem sexual harassment report: what you need to know

Helena Morrissey has published her report on the allegations of sexism in the Liberal Democrats triggered by the Lord Rennard scandal. In short, she concludes that there wasn’t a cover-up, but her report suggests the party was guilty more of a cock-up. She told journalists this afternoon that ‘mistakes were definitely made by Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander and Jo Swinson’, and that ‘I think the party should have done things differently’. Here are the five main points from the 59-page report on ‘Processes and culture within the Liberal Democrats and Recommendations for Change’: 1. The party failed to address complaints properly, but did not consciously cover them up. Morrissey’s report

Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: David Cameron lashes out at Labour

Oh dear. Another lousy day at the races for Ed Miliband. It began as soon as he stood up at PMQs. The mournful angularities of his face settled into a frosty grimace as the Tories greeted him with ironic whoops and cheers. And on they went, yelling and braying. Miliband seems to believe that adopting a look of injured decency will bring the house to order. But the more he glowered at the Tories the more they crowed back at him. It was awful to behold. He stood there, immobile, like a man returning from a difficult hour at the dentist only to find his house is on fire. His

Isabel Hardman

Cameron wins PMQs… or does he?

Well, that was an easy Prime Minister’s Questions for David Cameron, wasn’t it? Sometimes the PM just turns up for work and knocks it out of the park. It helped, of course, that for once he had his own team cheering him along, with backbencher after backbencher leaping up to ask loyal questions. The whips will be toasting a win in their office this afternoon. The Prime Minister had some very good retorts to Ed Miliband indeed. If Labour had a good week on welfare last week, the happy feelings will have evaporated today as Cameron managed to ridicule them not just on the detail of their spending pledges –

Isabel Hardman

Conservatives to take Labour and Lib Dem MPs with them to EU renegotiation talks

Tories preparing the ground for David Cameron’s renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Europe are to take MPs from other parties with them as they visit European cities, Coffee House has learned. The Fresh Start Project, made up of Conservative MPs campaigning for reform of the European Union, has already visited Prague, Warsaw and Berlin to hold preliminary meetings setting out the need for change. Its next round of visits will include members of the All Party Parliamentary Group for European Reform, which is co-chaired by Fresh Start’s Andrea Leadsom and Labour’s Thomas Docherty. The Conservative MPs organising the visits think including other parties will help them secure more meetings and

Isabel Hardman

Tories pressure Labour and Lib Dems on EU bill

Credit where credit’s due to the Tory spin machine for following up a good idea and putting pressure on Labour and the Lib Dems. This doesn’t happen very often, so it’s noteworthy. The party has launched a website called Let Britain Decide, which asks the public to back James Wharton’s private member’s bill for an EU referendum. It asks visitors to sign up to the campaign, lobby their MP, write to their local paper and brandish posters supporting the bill. A clever little paragraph on the site reads: ‘Currently, only one of the main three political parties believes the British people deserve a say on Europe: the Conservatives. They are

Tuesday

11 Jun 2013

Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson’s 2020 vision: 5 key points

Boy, is Boris Johnson persuasive. Not for him the anodyne policy documents that anyone else in regional or central government prefers to produce. His 2020 Vision document, launched today, is brimming with the sort of wit and turn of phrase that he deploys in his speeches and broadcasts. It says a key part of the Olympic road network ‘turned out at the eleventh hour to be about as robust as a freshly dunked digestive biscuit’, says low standards of literacy and numeracy are ‘a melancholy fact’ and a ‘savage reproach’, and offers interesting but useless facts such as ‘the world’s first traffic light arrived at the House of Commons in

Isabel Hardman

Diane Abbott, darling of the reforming Right

Perhaps the Bilderberg conference has had a lasting effect on Parliament, after all. Today we saw what can only be a conspiracy between the Labour left and Michael Gove’s band of reforming right-wingers. As the Education Secretary unveiled his plans to reform GCSEs, he was accosted by Diane Abbott, rarely knowingly in agreement with much of what the Coalition is doing. But the Labour MP didn’t want to tell Gove he was wrong. She wanted to say he was right. She asked Gove whether he agreed that ‘an emphasis on rigorous qualifications and an emphasis on attaining core academic subjects is not, as is sometimes argued, contrary to the interests

Steerpike

Dave does not play the Game of Thrones

Plots, summary executions, sex scandals, leaks and treachery. No, not the last few weeks for the Prime Minister, but rather your average episode of HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones. When asked at a charity reception that clashed with the series finale last night, whether he kept a close eye on it all, young Dave said ‘No, but I understand it’s getting brutal.’ Game of Thrones, that is, not the mood on the Tory backbenches. ‘Fair enough really, it’s a lot to commit to every week’ my source replied. Perhaps if Dave could give up on his addiction to iPhone games and dark Danish TV boxsets, he might pick up

Isabel Hardman

How should Labour deal with the teaching unions?

While dealing with the teaching unions is a simple stand-off for Michael Gove, spare a thought for poor old Stephen Twigg, Labour’s shadow education secretary, who has to work out how on earth to deal with the NUT and NASUWT habit of opposing everything. There is a palpable sense of frustration on the Labour frontbenches about the way the two largest unions in particular behave. Twigg has made clear that he does not support strike action planned over a general raft of discontent over many different issues, and he has opposed the work-to-rule industrial action promoted by these unions too. On performance-related pay, the unions behave as though Voldemort is

Isabel Hardman

Teaching unions: don’t reform exams, you might upset someone!

Critics and fans of Michael Gove alike accept that sometimes the Education Secretary can be a little too pugnacious. He often encourages the pantomime boos that accompany him, and will throw himself into any fight with gusto. But then the representatives of the leading teaching unions pop up to criticise his reforms, and it becomes very clear how Gove ended up like this. Christine Blower’s interview on the Today programme was one notable example. The NUT general secretary argued that grades hadn’t necessarily been devalued, and that the reforms might devalue the achievements of those children who have already passed their exams. She said: ‘We think this is slightly rushed

Monday

10 Jun 2013

Fraser Nelson

Tim Yeo “steps aside” as committee chairman. But will he now sue himself for libel?

From the moment that the Sunday Times caught Tim Yeo offering to advise energy companies for cash, it was clear that his chairmanship of the energy and climate change select committee was untenable. Yet he’s coming to this conclusion slowly. It has taken him until now to decide he’ll “step aside,” apparently under pressure from Labour members of the committee. Committee chairmen are elected nowadays, so what other members of the committee matters in a way it didn’t used to. And Yeo, who took £140,000 from various commercial interests last year, will now have become an embarrassment to the green movement more generally. Those who regard renewable energy as a massive racket will see in him

Isabel Hardman

Ken Clarke keeps Bilderberg secrets close to his (reptilian) chest

What an afternoon it has been for conspiracy lovers. First the Speaker summoned Ken Clarke to the Commons to answer an urgent question from arch theorist Michael Meacher about the Bilderberg meeting, and then MPs took it in turns to ask William Hague whether the Prism allegations meant they were under surveillance from the state. It was quite difficult to distinguish between the two, given we learnt little from either. First, Bilderberg. MPs arrived hoping that the scales would fall from their eyes as the minister revealed the great secrets of this high-powered conference. ‘The people who attend change slightly each year,’ explained Clarke, presumably referring to their metamorphosis into

Isabel Hardman

Finally, the Tory whips are cracking down on open dissent

Lurk around the Palace of Westminster today and you might hear a strange creaking noise. It’s not the Commons air conditioning, which has broken and is making appropriately eerie noises ahead of an urgent question on the Bilderberg meeting. No, that creaking sound is the Tory Whips’ Office finally limbering up to do something about wayward MPs. Sir George Young summoned backbencher Andrew Bridgen for an urgent meeting today after his letter of no confidence was leaked to the Mail on Sunday and he wrote an op-ed for the same paper saying ‘there is a credibility problem with the current leader’ and that the current situation was ‘like being in

Sebastian Payne

Welcome to The Spectator Archive: 180 years of history now online

In the basement of The Spectator’s offices in Old Queen Street, there are piles of tomes detailing our rich publishing history right back to 1828. Our archive is our most prized possession and today, we’re delighted to share that. For the first time, both scanned and digitised copies of the magazine from July 1828 to December 2008 can be browsed online using the beta Spectator Archive. Everything in the last five years can of course be found on spectator.co.uk The archive is a treasure trove. We have Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 1996 interview with the Spice Girls, Iain Macleod’s demolition of the Tory leadership from 1964, our trashing of Charles Dickens’

Steerpike

Andrew Mitchell, friend of the civil service

Tensions between some ministers and the civil service are at boiling point, with vicious briefings taking place on both sides. Seemingly keen to keep the pen-pushers sweet, former Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell lashed out last week at colleagues who have been winding up Sir Humphrey: ‘This behind-the-hand rubbishing of public servants is extremely unattractive.’ Spoken like a man who has certainly never been rude himself. A ‘former minister’ also told Sue Cameron in the Telegraph: ‘This is not good management and it’s not good politics, either. If it’s a choice between politicians and civil servants, there’s no doubt that the public will side with the civil servants.’ One wonders if

Fraser Nelson

Ed Balls is right: it’s time to think again about pensioners

You can accuse Ed Balls of a great many things (and we do), but he doesn’t do gaffes. His interviews are always worth paying close attention to, because every soundbite is carefully-considered, weighed for its political potency and constantly reused. Anyone who missed his interview with Andrew Neil yesterday should catch it (here) because – like Ben Brogan – I suspect it marks a new direction in UK economic debate: that pensioners’ benefits should be subject to cuts, like everything else. The curious way that George Osborne conducts his economic policy – as a constant game of chess against a political opponent – confers great power on Ed Balls. What

Isabel Hardman

Three questions for William Hague on PRISM

William Hague will come to the House of Commons today to offer some answers on the US National Security Agency’s PRISM programme. Here are three key questions MPs will want answered: What can he tell the Commons about how such an exchange of information could work? Douglas Alexander told Today he will be asking for information on the legal framework governing the UK access to information from the programme. Hague said yesterday that he could neither confirm nor deny that he was aware of PRISM, but he will still be asked about how interactions between the intelligence agencies are regulated. Are they able to circumvent British law by approaching the

Sunday

9 Jun 2013

Isabel Hardman

European Commission does eurosceptics’ dirty work, again.

Defenders of the status quo in the European Union like to argue that 3 million jobs in this country currently depend on Britain’s membership. Aside from the rather shaky maths behind that figure, it’s striking that today Chris Grayling is making a stand on a Brussels plan that will cost jobs in this country, rather than boost them. The Sunday Telegraph reports the Justice Secretary accusing the European Commission of ‘not living in the real world’, with new data protection laws threatening to cost british businesses around £360 million a year. Grayling makes it very clear in his interview with the newspaper that he views these proposals as a direct

James Forsyth

Ed Balls: Labour will include pensions in its welfare cap

Ed Balls has just told Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics that Labour will include pensions in their welfare cap. This opens up a major dividing line with the Tories who have been clear that George Osborne will exclude pensions from his spending cap. I suspect that Balls and Ed Miliband will now be badgered with questions about whether, if necessary, they’ll cut pensions — or not up-rate them — to meet the cap. Given the power of the grey vote in British politics (Labour estimates that one in every two voters in 2010 was over 55) they are going to come under massive pressure to rule this out. But,